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General Adventuring Guide
Uncharted Waters Online is a game in which you can sail to the different parts of the world. From your home city you make your first trip to the closest city, and eventually your ship will slip into the harbour of Nagasaki in Japan or your feet will touch the hot sand of the Hawaiian beach. All over this world there are long-forgotten ruins to uncover, poisonous spiders to determine, and dangerous sea currents to record. That is what adventurers do and, once you start, it will be surprisingly easy to get good at it. Advanced Adventure Features *Treasure Hunt *Shipwrecks & Shipwreck Guide *Dungeons *Sea Region Charting & Land Region Investigation *Fishing Guide The Basics Like me, and everyone else, you are going to go to school. There the instructors Alan, Andrea and Stellario will tell you most about everything you need to start. In addition you get a good amount of adventure experience and fame, as well as some guild cards to change jobs and a new ship that is faster and allows you to leave your barca behind. So what happens in school? In summary, if you start the game choosing adventure, then your first job will be Adventurer Learner, with the Sail handling, Surveying, Search and Body language skills already learned. If you started with anything else, then at any point you can switch to an adventure job using a guild card. You can change your job using a card at any guild master in an Adventure guild, found in most major cities. A basic job change card is the Adventurer’s Guild Card: Jobs Let’s explain what jobs and skills do. This is not only important for your adventurer career, but for trading and battling as well. Jobs are simply a collection of skills. Skills are what allow you to take actions in this game, as an adventurer it allows you to make those discoveries, as a trader it allows you to haggle a better price for your goods and buy more of them, as a maritime player it allows you to repair your ship. A higher skill rank means you can make better discoveries, buy more goods, and repair more durability. Thus it is important to rank up your main skills. That is what jobs will help you with. It is a bunch of skills that are favoured. Favoured skills only require half the amount of skill proficiency to increase in rank. An unfavoured skill requires 200 proficiency to go from rank 1 to 2, while favoured it only takes 100 proficiency. Also an unfavoured skill can be ranked up to rank 10, while a favoured skill can reach rank 15. Lastly, if your skill is rank 11 and you change to a job that does not favour this skill, then the skill is capped at rank 10. Changing again to a job that favours the skill, gives you rank 11 and all the proficiency you had before. So if you are using a number of skills, then it’s important to have a job that favours them. The wiki has a search function in case you want to find a specific job: Jobs Search To get an overview of the quests required for each job, look here: Job My personal recommendation is to start with the Excavator job with which you can do Archaeological related quests. If you prefer to do biology or geography related adventuring, then choose the Biologist or Helmsperson job respectively. Adventure Skills The first type of adventure skills are the knowledge skills. These are passive skills and higher levels allow you to do better quests. The skills are Geography, Archaeology, Theology, Biology, Art, Appraisal and Astronomy: – needed to discover anything related to geography, from the Niagara Falls to Rapa Nui. There are over 300 geography discoveries to be found all over the world – needed to discover historic sites and historical relics, such as Troy or the logbook of Zheng He. Archaeology is needed to make almost 400 discoveries, a great amount of those are found in Europe – required to discover religious architecture and religious relics, like the Abu Simbel temple or the Ten Commandments. Theology works very similar to archaeology, and has 250 discoveries scattered over the world. Europe and India are the best places for these discoveries – different from biology classes in high school, this skill is required to discover animals, fossils and plants. Biology will keep you most entertained with 700 discoveries. In contrast to the other skills, these discoveries are mostly located outside Europe, in Africa, Southeast Asia and America – same story as above, you can investigate the Mona Lisa or Japanese painted scrolls. Art has only 130 discoveries, which are specifically located within Europe and East Asia – used to discover jewels and valuable items. There a little over 250 discoveries, most are found within Europe, but the most valuable gems are outside in Africa or India – a new adventure skill that is used to discover celestial bodies Next are discovery skills that you need to make the actual discovery. These are Observe, Search, Recognition, Ecology and Unlock, all of them are active skills except for unlock. – used to guide you to the location of discovery. The alternative is the item Perception of Artisan/Scholar/Explorer in case you are low on available skill slots. This skill only has one rank so you can freely drop it and relearn it anytime. – used to dig up archaeological and religious relics, artworks, treasures and fossils – map historic sites and religious architecture, and chart geographical discoveries – used to analyse an animal or plant species – allows you to unlock treasure chests in dungeons and open the way to hidden items. It is required to obtain the most desired items, such as the sword Excalibur or the armour of Alexander the Great. Lastly there are other skills that are important for any adventurer. Find a list with adventure skills here: Adventure Skills I will quickly discuss the essential ones. Look at the other skills and decide if you find them useful. – grants a boost to your sailing speed: 0.5% per skill rank – creates a map of your surroundings on sea or a map of the whole area in a land area – a skill that prevents ambushes at sea, does not prevent attacks from visible NPC pirates – lowers the probability of NPC bandits in land areas attacking you and lowers the rate at which you gain fatigue in land areas – actually a maritime skill that increases your ships turning speed. It is a very good skill to have inside and outside battle and since it ranks slowly, you should take it very soon Quests So now, we had our fun in school and your instructors are happy to finally be rid of you. Let’s assume you changed your job to Excavator and learned all the skills you could at a guild master in any Adventure guild in a mayor city. That means you have Archaeology, Search and Unlock learned, a good start for any adventuring career. There are basically two ways to get a discovery. The first one is to take a quest from an adventure quest mediator. They can be found at any mayor city, including your starting city. Below you see an adventure mediator in the square of London, talk to him and click the upper button (the one with a scroll and a red ribbon around it). A screen will pop up with several quest options. If you do not have any adventure knowledge and discovery skills, then the list may be very limited. In this case I selected a quest called ‘Crusade of the people’. The requirements of this quest are to have rank 1 in search and archaeology. The quest information also mentions the Dutch language as a requirement, however, I do not have Dutch and still I can accept and complete this quest. Language requirements are in most cases not necessary to complete the quest, and are never required to accept a quest. However, some quests will not show or rarely show if you have do not have all the requirements already fulfilled. Usually, a quest is actually a request to investigate something. So you start gathering information. In this quest you are sent to investigate one of the crusades. In the quest details it says that you should start asking around in Bordeaux. If you scroll down, then it says Bordeaux tavern. Sail to bordeaux and enter the tavern. There are several NPC’s inside the tavern and you can either talk to each of them separately or go directly to the barkeep. In this case the barkeep is really the person you had to talk to, therefore he will give you some quest information. This information can always be reviewed by looking at the quest screen (press q). As you can see the barkeep tells you to go ask the city official of Bordeaux. Go to him and the official will tell you that the priest in the church of Amsterdam has more information for you. Yes, NPC’s will send you all over the place. You make the journey back to the North Sea and dock in Amsterdam. Inside the church you talk to the various NPC’s present and the Vicar will give you the information you need. He tells you the crusade was a disaster and that the archives have some materials that you can study. Go to the archives of Amsterdam and browse the Archaeology shelf, after all it is an archaeology quest. Body language does not work to read books; you need to either have the Dutch language learned or a translation note, which can be bought from the Interpreter. In Amsterdam the Interpreter can be found in the square, and in most cities he is close to the market keeper. Reading once is enough, no need to browse, to give you your last piece of information. When you have your last piece of information, you are ready to make the discovery! Your quest progress is done and you will get a final summary of your quest and a description of the discovery location. Go the indicated location and use your observe skill (or an item with the same effect). It produces a pillar of light on the location of the discovery. Inside the Calais church, this is easy to find (use observe multiple times if necessary). Walk to the pillar of light until you are standing in front of it, and then use your search skill (In this case you need search, in other quests you might need another discovery skill, e.g. recognition in geography quests). My search skill is high enough to find the discovery and my archaeology skill is sufficient to appraise it. That means I make the discovery and complete the quest! You can review your discoveries by going to Record -> Discoveries (or click t). All the discoveries you made are shown here, each with a small description. The only thing that is left is to report the quest and collect the rewards. Remember how you took this quest from the mediator in London? This means that you can only report this quest to the mediator in London. That sounds very bothersome, right? After all, sailing from Amsterdam to London is not so far, but imagine taking a quest from Lisbon to Southeast Asia. That is where taverns come in. Perhaps you have noticed that there is always a girl or guy standing next to the barkeep. He or she has her own name, like Johanna, Angela or Rosario. Every city that has quest mediators also has someone like this at the tavern or rest area. Talk to him or her, have a drink together and they will send someone to report for you, which gives you the rewards instantly. However, your friendship needs to be high enough. You can increase your friendship by giving them gifts or telling them stories. You need to drink with them once before these options become available. Gifts are clothes and accessories, the nicer/more expensive the higher the increase in friendship. A higher friendship allows you to report higher difficulty quests (more stars). Telling stories is only possible if you have the Persuasion skill. You use a discovery card to increase your friendship (better cards give a higher increase in friendship). I do not particularly recommend learning persuasion, since giving gifts is easier and since persuasion uses a skill slot. Once your friendship is high enough, you can always report every quest you have. Lastly, some remarks: *Some quests have a hidden fame requirement. Normally this is adventure fame related. *Some quests require you to do one or more quests before you can find this quest. In this way one quest yields a discovery which opens up the next quest, which opens up the discovery needed for another quest, and so on. This is called a quest chain. They can be short, for example the discovery of The Staff of Peter the Hermit is necessary to do the quest Crusade Tragedy from Seville, this is a more difficult theology quests and rewards etienne’s staff, a +1 theology hand item. There are quest chains of close to 100 quests long! *You can refresh the quests at the quest mediator using a Quest Mediation Permit (QMP), a consumable item. They are really helpful when you are looking for a specific quest or if there are not interesting quests showing. QMP’s are rewarded for most adventure quests and can also be obtained from rewarding a map discovery to a famous person (more on that later). Another version is the special QMP (SQMP), an Astro consumable item that refreshes the quest list with rarer, higher difficulty quests. Leaving a port and returning refreshes quests as well, but you need to go to another town and back (or at least sail out at sea until the city cannot be seen anymore before returning). *Quests that are not part of a quest chain can be repeated and their rewards can be obtained again as well. Quests in a quest chain can only be redone if in some way you lose that discovery card. Their rewards cannot be obtained (or there is a very low chance, I have not tested this). *Using the skill Surveying you create a map of your surroundings. On sea that creates a square map that shows a greater area then the mini-map in the bottom right of your screen. Also cities that you already discovered are shown as white points and hovering over such a point shows the city name. In a land area the whole area is shown while using surveying. Both the entrance to the area, and the exit to a second land area are indicated with a flag icon. Walking close by a landmark also marks the landmark on the map with a flag icon. Some maps or quests indicate the area around a landmark to make a discovery and some quest information is actually gathered by clicking a landmark. You can change the transparency by going to System > Settings > Change in-game display settings. *There is another advantage of creating a map using Surveying. If you are close enough to your discovery location and use observe, then a yellow star will appear on the map. This happens both in sea and land areas. This can save you some time finding the exact location, when you don’t see the pillar of light yet. Maps The other way to make a discovery is to get a map from an archive. Enter the archives and talk to the scholar, then select the option to browse through his books. While reading books, you get proficiency in that skill: browsing archaeology books gives you proficiency in the archaeology skill. You also have the chance to find a map. This map I got at the London archives gives information that leads to a discovery. Maps are simply documents that tell you to go somewhere in order to make a discovery. The map I found above tells me to go to the outskirts of Calais, the northwest corner. I will also need both search and archaeology rank 1. The way maps work is very similar to quests. You skip the information gathering and go straight to the right location. In this case the outskirts of Calais, South Calais. Once you are in the land area, open your Use Item menu. Hover with your mouse over the map to see the directions it gives you (northwest of the map in this case) and double click the map to get a direction (go north, south, west or east). Walk around while following the directions, which should lead you towards the right direction. Like the using observe at the end of a quest, using (double clicking in the Use Item menu) a map will produce a column of light. Once you see the light, go to it and in this case you use search to excavate the relic. Some last points: *You use search, ecology or recognition in order to find whatever it is that your map leads you to. The requirements for these skills are indicated on the map, but you can actually open the map with the required rank minus 2. In case a map says you need ecology rank 8, biology rank 8, then you actually only need to have ecology rank 6, but still biology rank 8. The same thing applies to unlock. To unlock something you also only need the indicated rank minus 2. Keep in mind that it might take longer to find and unlock something when your skill rank is lower than indicated. Failing to unlock can cause you to lose some crew in a trap. *Not all maps you receive in the archives lead to a discovery. I will call these treasure maps to avoid confusion. Treasure maps have the same kind of instructions written as normal maps, but instead of a discovery you get an item or some trade goods *Some treasure maps cannot be obtained from the archives. They can be plundered from sea or land NPCs and in a few rare cases they are the reward for a quest. *There are many locations at which you can make a discovery. Most are land areas, such as the outskirts of South Calais. Some you can enter these from a town, by talking to the gatekeeper, others you can enter from sea by arriving at a landing point. Your in-game map of the world (press m) shows their locations as 2 green little trees next to each other. Some land areas give access to a second land area. To access the second land area you need to do a specific quest. For example, anyone can land on the south of England, at a landing point called British Isles South Coast, and walk around. However, to enter the second land area, you need to do a quest that leads to the discovery of Stonehenge. It is a regular adventure quest from the London adventure mediator, called Investigation of Stonehenge. Such quests always require recognition, not search. Besides land areas you can also make discoveries in towns, in buildings such as churches or mansions.